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University (Mis)education?
The University of Guyana is in the news once again – unfortunately however, not for the reasons that have transfixed educators in the developed world that we are supposed to be emulating. While Britain and the US, for instance, are vigorously debating the role of the university in the present global conjuncture, we are squabbling about firing lecturers. It would seem that just to say, “We have a university,” satisfies whatever need such an institution is supposed to address. In other words there is no need to evaluate the university from a functional standpoint.
But surely a people that clamoured and fought for freedom, and defined that freedom as the right to become “educated” cannot accept such a position. It was education at every stage of our national and historical development that was the lodestone for our progress. Looking back, it was primary education in the immediate years after slavery that created the conditions for the formation of the independent village political economy. The struggle for independence was led by the few that had been exposed to tertiary education but for the masses, primary education was still the standard.
In the post-independence era, secondary education became necessary for the expansion and modernisation of the economy into services. We still have not achieved universal secondary education in a real rather that notional sense. Our dropout levels and the abysmal numbers that still cannot achieve even one subject at the CSEC are reflected in our national inability to become competitive in marketing and processing our primary production in agriculture and mining so as to raise our national income satisfactorily.
But even as we lag at that level, the world has not stood still: we are smack in the middle of a globalised information economy that demands a whole new educational standard if we are to even stand a chance of remaining in place. This information economy presents both a challenge and an opportunity: the challenge is to raise our educational levels to par with the new standards and the opportunity is for us to leapfrog development if we can successfully achieve the latter. This information age demands effective tertiary and university education.
We can learn from the experience of the developed countries that are frantically examining their practices as they grapple with crises on all fronts that are threatening to drop them back into the ranks of the poorer countries. Recently, an unprecedented study in the US that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college, found that large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education. Does this sound familiar?
Many of the students, the study concluded, graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighbourhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin. Is it surprising that in this season of continuous politicking our leaders can literally offer “song and dance” as their campaign platform?
In the present climate, where a vast majority of our students heading to university end up studying “business” and “social work”, it is most interesting to discover from the US study that students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills. Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. It would appear that these students are simply learning by rote or by formulaic methods.
There has been some disquiet expressed by elements of the government on the university administration as to the quality of its output. It is time that there is a national discourse on the issue.
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